‘Like a tamer and a lion’: Marie Mullen, far left, as Mag and Aisling O’Sullivan as Maureen, with Marty Rea as Pato.
Photograph: Stephen Cummiskey

It looks at odds with itself, this set, waiting for you as you come in to the auditorium; real and not real. A cottage kitchen seems as wide as a strip field. Along its worn-papered walls stand a big old sink and a scruffy range. Water will run from taps, smoke will rise from the oven, but above the back wall a vivid sky brightens blue or darkens with falling rain. Space is cramped yet limitless. Francis O’Connor’s design hauntingly physicalises Martin McDonagh’s text: everyday in detail, mythic in dimension.

Aaron Monaghan as Ray in The Beauty Queen of Leenane. Photograph: Stephen Cummiskey

A mother in her 70s, a daughter in her 40s: the pair live here, on a hillside by Leenane. Their only visitors are two brothers: Ray (Aaron Monaghan) is a messenger for Pato, who makes two return trips from England, where he works as a labourer (on press night, Marty Rea was roundly and deservedly applauded for his nuanced delivery of Pato’s fateful letter home to the daughter, his “beauty queen”). What begins as a naturalistic-seeming story of thwarted dreams becomes also a parable about loving and leaving (or not leaving) family, lover, native land.

McDonagh’s situations and characters are rooted in a reality made up of seemingly small, recurring specifics – brand names, soap-opera titles. In a production as stunningly performed as this, the clever patterning of these particularities allows the action to reach extremes of emotion, even horror, without losing an underpinning bassline beat of laughter. Marie Mullen, having played the daughter in Druid’s 1996 premiere, is an extraordinary mother in this, the company’s 20th-anniversary production. Mother and daughter (the equally extraordinary Aisling O’Sullivan) eye one another like a tamer and lion in a cage, each taking turns at cracking the whip, neither ever trusting the other not to pounce; spellbinding, terrifying. Garry Hynes’s direction is so fine it is invisible – as if nothing on the stage could have been other than it is.